Daydream Houses of Los Angeles by Charles Jencks. Rizzoli, 64 pp.
The canon of writing on Los Angeles architecture has probably done as much to elevate the city’s design profile as the built work itself, proselytizing narratives of sun-and-sea residential lifestyles or property-and-privilege real estate economies to the traditional centers of architectural discourse back east. The major titles will likely be familiar to almost any architecture aficionado: Esther McCoy’s Five California Architects circa 1960, Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies from 1971, and Mike Davis’s 1990 City of Quartz have variously cast Angeleno building design and urbanism as the city’s defining protagonists and antagonists. In words and in mortar, modernism was enshrined as the lingua franca of local architecture.
Charles Jencks’s Daydream Houses of Los Angeles never figures on the must-read lists that recommend all the above—a shame, really, since it has proved at least as prescient as any of these more established architectural scriptures in the 40-some years since publication in 1978. Jencks, of course, is eminently celebrated as the first critic to document and theorize architectural postmodernism in the late 1970s. But his witty, offhand survey of eclectic residential architecture on the Westside, written more or less concurrently with Jencks’s hegemonic Language of Postmodern Architecture, has been largely repressed from Los Angeles’s design consciousness. Yet Daydream Houses documents—it both celebrates and caricatures the subject matter—a gloriously historicist and motley taste for residential design that has little of the propriety accorded to, say, the Schindler House.
“Because of the strong, contradictory qualities they evoke (a result of their exaggerated qualities),” writes Jencks in his introduction to the “daydream houses,” “it is particularly hard to give them an appropriate and modest appreciation.” My own feelings toward the daydream houses are, much like the exaggerated scale of their exterior ornament, outsize. I love these buildings, hybrid eccentricities that ruffle the anesthetized aesthetic of modern(ish) good taste that now fuels rabid real estate speculation in the neighborhood.
In a way, they’ve become loci of my own nostalgia. I grew up in Boys Town, right before the real estate boom and in its nascent stages. In the 1990s and early aughts, large swaths of West Hollywood were still a haven of sorts for communities that were elsewhere disenfranchised or deemed undesirable. Much of the area examined in the book’s first section, Boys Town Variegated, was occupied by refugees and recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union or sexual minorities until about 2003 or 2004. At that point, land values catapulted, speculative building took off, and postwar multifamily, lower-and middle-income housing were demolished to make way for new luxury developments and demographic shifts. A friend recently described West Hollywood as a continuous high-end strip mall. She’s not wrong.
Jencks describes the house at 8968 Dick Street as “Ronchamp Ski-Jump with Mushroom Overtones.”
While the daydream houses were never emblematic of some outré West Hollywood—Jencks construes them as aspirational homes for the professional class—their architectural idiosyncrasies were born of a broader context sympathetic to hybridity and heterogeneity. As such, the sundry exemplars presented in Daydream Houses of Los Angeles take myriad forms, though a handful of characteristics do persist across Jencks’s sampling. Most of the daydream houses, and certainly those in Boys Town, are relatively small, especially compared with the celebrity mansions Jencks suggests they emulate. Their authors (mostly unknown or unnamed) lifted flagrantly from historical styles without any of the requisite regard for rules of order, proportion, and iconography, and in doing so, they produced sometimes-whimsical, often-outlandish architecture that flouted (probably inadvertently) the aura of civility and cultivation commanded by steel-frame, open-plan, glass-enclosed residences. “The Daydream Houses have a notional fantasy about them,” Jencks offers, “similar to a momentary reverie.”
The original building, the one memorialized by Jencks, might as well be dead. The current iteration might as well be dead to me.
Even more so than his brief introduction, Jencks’s photo captions reveal his bemusement—and at times ambivalence— at the sight of L.A.’s daydream houses. “Branch Bank Parthenon” is what he dubs a curiously colonnaded single-story cottage on Mulholland Drive. “A popular style for houses, drive-in banks and the All American Hamburger chain,” the caption quips, sending up the grand ambitions and gestures at civic gravitas crowding the building’s small exterior. Farther down Mulholland Jencks memorializes another miniature colonnaded facade, this one punctuated by geometric shrubbery, as “Topiary Fascist”—a perfectly absurd moniker that evokes the hilarity of the exterior’s incongruities without quite sneering at them.
Much as the daydream houses were built in an urban milieu permissive of contrarianism, their ilk has not been spared the texturelessness wrought by West Hollywood’s more recent gentrification. Take, for example, a vigorously decorated shed to which Jencks granted the sobriquet “Baby Blue Lobster with Corner Frostings” circa 1978—true to its name, it is a veritable glossary of mismatched facade ornament. In Jencks’s contemporaneous photograph (all of the book’s 60-plus images are his), Corinthian columns appear glued to each corner of the house, a pointed pediment is tacked onto the flat roof, and relief sculpture depicting a lobster surrounded by volutes at either end does indeed crown the frieze. Visiting the address earlier this month, I found the house almost completely effaced: stripped of all ornament, repainted a vanilla shade of khaki, and outfitted with overhanging eaves that signal some vague idea of the ranch style as a California vernacular. The original building, the one memorialized by Jencks, might as well be dead. The current iteration might as well be dead to me.
Yet the daydream houses’ mannerist legacy still lingers in one neighborhood over in Tehrangeles. In the residential corridor of Beverly Hills densely populated by Iranian émigrés, so-called Persian Palaces combine any genus of column with outsize entryways, exaggerated keystones, balustrade balconies, and pastel hues. This more recent eclecticism met with chagrin and xenophobic criticism from certain neighbors panicked about respectability and correct taste. Such moralizing seems to suggest that Jencks was essentially right: contemporary architecture would do well to laugh a little.